The Death of Small Creatures (22 page)

I think
pavilion
and equate the word with a sense of joviality: a place of happy gathering; an oval gleaming under moon and stars like an untouched ice skating rink, that shape that is not quite a circle and upon which no blade has stricken, the perfect untainted arena; a place of dreams and magical animals; a circus; a fairy tale. It is, in my mind, everything but what it aspires to be here. We all know it's really just another institution.

Who do they think they're kidding?

Pavilion comes from
butterfly
, as in French,
papillon
.

Butterfly translated into Italian means a woman's
farfalla
, like a butterfly's wings.

This place is becoming strange to me now, its halls, rooms and locked doors, its quiet despair and latent hostility, its silent rage, its long ticking nights and eerie stillness when everyone disappears. I am seeing it for what it is, and surely that means it's time to go.

I sense a delicate opening.

The nurses gather
us all together in the lounge area. People are murmuring, whispering. I hear the words
morphine
,
death
and
sleep
. Dave pulls me aside. He looks stunned, teary. Renee is crying, and Kathy is holding Renee. “Lisa died last night,” Dave says.

The head nurse appears and everyone falls silent.

Maybe it's all a bad rumour. How can she be dead? How can someone I know be dead?

“We've just spoken with the coroner,” the nurse says, “and he has confirmed that Lisa died in her sleep last night.”

Kathy and Renee cling to each other and sob. Dave wanders away with his hands in his pockets. I don't know what to do. I stay for a while then go to my room, lie down and write.

Dear Lisa,

Who read my palms and gave me prosperity, whose long blonde hair I braided three times, I did not feel the death in you, not even your peril or pain. Even as you slumped forward in the recliner and I had to keep tugging your braids to keep you from slumping into a morphine-induced stupor, I felt nothing of you.

What happened?

I pulled your braid hard.

I examined your highlights and split ends, your overall lovely deadness. I wanted to say “It's okay,” and “I love you,” that night you read my palms and I pulled them away, embarrassed of my gashes, because you looked so sad, so sorry for having made me feel uncomfortable. I wanted to say, “I love you,” because if I can't say it to myself, maybe I can say it to somebody else.

Kathy and I are going to the hospital chapel. I am going to leave a note for you, where all the other goodbye notes have been left, on that alter by the burning candle.

Thank you for letting me braid your hair.

Dear Lisa,

I braided your hair three times while you were still alive, anchored to me the way one woman is anchored to another woman; a girlhood fascination with the art of weaving hair.

We own that, don't we?

I will light a candle for you and leave my note behind, pin it among the farewell notes that have also been pinned to the bulletin board for all of the dead who became dead before you.

RIP.

My things are
gathered at my feet, packed in plastic, Pavilion-issued bags.

I hold the
Descant
journal, flip through the pages, and glance upon the reddest gash on my wrist. A superficial wound, nothing perilous.

This will scar.

Dr. P's voice is soft but intelligent, caring but direct. I am not the worst he sees in a day.

He pulls his chair in closer to me but maintains an appropriate distance between us.

How I want him to kiss me.

After twenty days in the ward, he signs my release papers.

“You are free to go,” he says.

I am free to go.

But what do I do?

I look down at the journal again, read the inscription:
What is there to do but this: to pause, to speculate on what exists outside of one's self (the nature of a butterfly's wing), or to descant in rapturous terms on the various properties of a bit of stone.

To dream of a woman's long hair moving through my hands, and my hands moving gently through a woman's long hair.

I think upon leaving but do not say:
I love you. I love you. I love you.

Journal

May 28, 2009

Discharged. Back into the world. I'm temporarily staying with my parents in the valley until I can move into the suite in my sister's house.

My life has no familiar characteristics. No husband. No house. No job.

This may all hit me harder later.

Nine

The Wonderlock (Summer 2009)

Leigh is gone.
My sister is looking after my rabbits. What now?

For the next month or so my life will be all about lugging, toiling, moving from one temporary abode to another: my parents' place in Abbotsford, a campground with Dave, my friend Megan's, then finally a little suite in the basement of my sister's new house I'll tentatively call home. I will be unloading myself on others for some time. It's harrowing, humbling.

After the brief
sojourn at my parents' place in the Fraser Valley, I find myself as if by accident at the campground with Dave.

My mom doesn't want me to go. “You're not ready,” she says. “Someone needs to be looking after you.”

“I'm fine,” I say, knowing it's a lie, knowing I could fall off the face of the earth at any moment.

After some deliberation she concedes, drives me to the ferry and drops me off hesitantly with only a backpack and a couple plastic bags full of toiletries.

Dave meets me at the Swartz Bay ferry terminal on his bicycle. He loads his bike onto the front of the city bus, and the bus takes us to a stop off the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. On the other side of the highway is farmland, rows upon rows of neatly tilled soil, sprouts shooting up here and there. I wish to know what is growing in there. It is a fierce desire to know all things that consumes me now, a way of keeping the world in order: to know the speed of vehicles whizzing by, the temperature of the air, the depth of soil, the root of all things working together in some orderly fashion to make this terrifying period of my life more tolerable. We cross the highway and begin an ascent up the long hilly road that leads to the beach and the campground.

Dave believes the world will end next spring. He calls it the Wonderlock. He will cover himself in mud and wear a tinfoil hat. He believes aliens are coming. He believes we are all doomed. He believes Bob Dylan is the second coming of Christ.

That night Dave passes me the crystal meth pipe. It's hot. He says to Becky, “Babysit Trish, okay?” Becky rolls her eyes. She is the dealer's girlfriend. The dealer, we'll call him Andrew, has a green Mohawk and a nose ring.

Becky shows me how to smoke crystal meth, how to hold the pipe with one hand and block off the airway with a finger, then hold the lighter under the crystal until the globe fills with that silky white smoke. I suck hard, wanting as always the best, the most, of everything because I am a perfectionist and I need this. I want to fill my life with this smoke now that everything that was once familiar is gone.

I exhale. A huge white cloud of smoke fills Dave's camper. It's comical.

“Holy shit, woman,” Dave says. “Jesus.”

It comes so gradually you don't notice that you're high. The process of getting there, for me, is mellow; it's that languid white smoke. But the effect is frenetic. You find yourself talking a mile a minute. Your skin prickles. It's always this way with me and drugs, slow at first then sparkly and wonderful.

I am high,
watching the sky, awestruck, sitting on driftwood waiting for the clouds to dissipate and for the ship to appear, to make itself known to us, just Dave and me, out here on the beach before the Pacific Ocean.

The smoke churns in the crystal meth pipe the way the clouds churn in the sky up there. It's a little dream inside a ball of glass. It's my crystal ball.

“Just watch, keep watching,” Dave says.

“I am,” I say, only partly believing the ship will come forth, sort of stunned however by the possibility that it might, just maybe, appear, and that I have come to believe in such a thing.

I clench sand in a fist until my knuckles turn white, worry the grains through my fingers.

“There are faces up there too,” Dave says, and he points to a massive configuration of clouds that do in fact look like the face of God, the traditional version of God, that forlorn Santa Claus with the great white beard, wavy hair.

“Yes, I see it,” I say.

God's eyes are set wide apart, making him appear slightly alien. God's eyes are two milky blue ovals of sky.

“And there too,” Dave says. “See the alien, the big oval head, the small mouth, the big eyes?”

“Yes, I think so,” I say.

“Oh, watch for the ship.”

There is God, an alien and an alien ship in the sky. The tide is coming in. The ocean is encroaching upon us. I'm cold and hungry, have not slept in three days, have eaten only a handful of cereal—forced myself to eat it because when I looked at myself in the camper mirror this morning I thought I was dying.

There are a variety of clouds large enough to conceal the gigantic oval-shaped ship that Dave says is lurking above the sea. You can see the effects of the hidden ship. The clouds churn spumes of white smoky stuff, a disturbance in the atmosphere, the thermal heat of spaceship engines reacting with our air. The engines blast and churn up clouds into great cauldrons of pink smoke. But no ship.

I flinch, feel something touch my wrist, but there's nothing there—just the faint gashes left behind from my days in the hospital, thirty or so horizontal gashes across each wrist.

I look to the sky.

God's face is stretched. It is as if a great vortex from the east, a vacuum, is sucking God's face into it. God's mouth is gaping now, his eyes narrowed. The sun has broken through, casts its light upon the ocean making the waves silvery. My face is warm.

My heart is pounding, my mind racing; a thousand slender aliens marching across the sky. I feel the vortex sucking me into it.

My face is stretching, thinning into vapour.

“There,” I say. “The ship is coming.”

I sit at
the table in Red's fifth-wheel camper, smoking crack.

This is the best I can feel, the best I've ever felt in my life.

I want to stay here, right here in this camper, smoking crack for the rest of my life. It must never end. There must always be more crack. Red must come here to the campground every day, saddle up beside Dave's little camper, and open his door to us.

The pipe burns my lips, creates an instantaneous blister where the mouth purses in the middle as I suck in hard, where hot glass and my flesh touch. My lips are briefly sealed together, but I pull them apart again. It stings. I don't realize until later when I look in a mirror that a blister has formed, sealed my lips together then broken again in one pull of the crack pipe.

I tilt my head back and moan. “Fuck… this feels so good.”

Red sits across from me along with Mike and another guy.

We pass the pipe around.

I have great lung capacity, (I was tested back in Biology 12), so when I suck into the end of the pipe, it seems to go on and on. I fill my lungs to the bursting point, hold it in, and exhale. A great white cloud blooms from my lips, fills the camper. All the guys laugh.

“Holy, woman,” one guy says.

I feel a little stupid about my big cloud and a little selfish, like I'm hoarding Red's crack, freeloading, which I am. I didn't pay for this stuff. I'm a friend of Dave's and that seems to be enough.

I am compelled to be here because my life has become a void, without context, without substance. Everything is strange and unfamiliar. I want to disappear inside the high or have it kill me altogether.

“Here,” I say, sliding off my gold ring with the two little diamonds on either side of the turquoise stone, a graduation gift from an ex-boyfriend. “Does anyone want this?”

Mike leaps for it, says, “Yeah!” I pass it over. “I'm going to give this to Carol.”

The pipe returns to me. I take a long hit, feel I have paid into it, like now I can smoke as much crack as I want, I can smoke crack all night long and no one can stop me.

This goes on,
day after day. At night, Dave takes me to the trees near the beach and stares hard into them, into their third eyes, says he is communicating with them. He drags me around the campground parking lot at night after everyone has gone to sleep, a few campfires burning to embers here and there. We skulk under lampshades. He grabs me by the arm one time, tells me to stop, look up, look directly into the light, so I do. We look away from the light into the darkness again, our vision now containing watery orbs that drift always off the periphery of the eye. Dave says these are aliens.

I reach my breaking point. Even I, with my drug-induced history, am beginning to feel the strangeness of it all. Even I am not this crazy.

Three straight days of Dylan blaring on Dave's stereo, the camper walls buzzing, my brain buzzing and clouds of crystal meth and crack swirling through the cramped quarters and pooling softly in my lungs. This isn't fun anymore.

It's been two weeks.

I look like death, have lost weight; my complexion is ghastly.

Dave is hard at it, blasting music and transcribing away on his laptop as it goes. He believes there is secret code, messages, in Dylan's lyrics. Every few seconds he stops the track and backs it up to listen again, so he can decipher the words more accurately. The stop and go is jarring and counterintuitive to the mind's natural narrative leanings.

Then he plays the music backwards too. The backwards singing comes out warped, vowels stretched, intonation ripped and realigned along some grotesque linguistic logic that almost makes sense but ultimately does not.

Arm in arm the Lark I was brought by cow, his bride.

Brought Ham, they honey moon.

All-and-In, their Ram, scares me more…

I look out the small camper window to the yellow field in the distance, reservation land, and to the dilapidated longhouse in the middle of the field. A barbed-wire fence separates me from that land. It's early morning, and the long yellow grass glistens in dew.

“I've got to get out of here,” I say. Dave seems not to hear me, seems unaware of my presence. He has, in fact, seemed unaware of my presence for days now.

He says, “Wha…?”

“I'm leaving.”

“Yeah,” he says, like a declaration, as if affirming that I am in fact leaving, as if he thought of it first.